Darby English, the newly appointed Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program (RAP) at the Clark, will engage in a conversation with David Breslin, Associate Director of the RAP, in the Stone Hill Center. As Starr Director, English will be leading the program's international agenda of intellectual events and collaborations and will oversee the Clark's library and its active residential scholars' program, all based on the Institute's 140-acre campus. The conversation will touch on English's intellectual interests and his past and current writing projects.
English graduated from Williams College in 1996 with a degree in art history and philosophy and earned a doctorate in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester in 2002. He served on the University of Chicago's faculty from 2003 until assuming the Starr Director position, teaching modern and contemporary art and cultural studies. He served as the assistant director of the Research and Academic Program from 1999 through 2003.
English is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007), which has been called a "groundbreaking and lucid book [that] expands the social and intellectual context for recent African-American art." [Maurice Berger, research professor, University of Maryland Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture]. In addition to numerous articles, essays, and reviews, English is also a co-editor of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (MIT Press, 2003; republished Rizzoli, 2007).
The lecture is free to the general public.